Mr. Speaker, I stand here to support the intent of private member's motion No. 513 with some reservation and obviously some questions.
This is a private member's motion put forward by a government member, but it seems strange that the government has not given the motion the type of high-level support that was given to the private member's bill on the cancellation of the gun registry. Regardless, it speaks volumes about the priorities of the government that it has given so little support to such a fundamental and important issue as health care. However, this should not come as a surprise since in its four years as government the administration has said little or nothing about health care, medicare, health human resources or injury prevention, all issues mentioned in this private member's bill. So I wish my hon. colleague good luck with her efforts, given that her motion has such a low priority on her party's agenda. Notwithstanding, I want to give the member credit for attempting to put on the agenda such an important and urgent issue.
Let us look at the hon. member's motion.
She is looking at encouraging and assisting provincial and territorial governments and the medical community and other groups to lessen the burden on Canada's health care system. That is laudable. I applaud it and I support it. However, in question period and at other times, her party continually refuses to answer questions on the functioning of the Canadian health care system, whether it is medicare, prevention systems, or public health systems. Especially on medicare, her party calls it a provincial jurisdiction, as the provinces are struggling with the rising costs of delivering medicare.
As we well know, in times of high unemployment and in times of an economic downturn, international studies and Canadian studies have shown over the years there are high levels of stress for populations, high levels of depression and other physical illnesses such as ulcers, hypertension and heart disease. These all seem to increase during this time, because it is well known that economic status and employment are key indicators of population health.
All the provinces are struggling at a very difficult time to take care of the need for health care services, and the government has not raised a finger to help. Not only have the Conservatives not raised a finger to help, they have not even raised their voices in support of or to find some kind of solution to the problem. In fact, they have been given a failing grade by the health professions for their lack of attention to the wait times list and to the process of better management of the health care system.
One only has to look at the Romanow report to see excellent examples of what should be done to deal with creating a more efficient management system for medicare in this country, to deal with issues such as prevention or health promotion and keeping populations healthy, and to deal with issues such as technology. One just needs to read the Romanow report to see things such as home care, pharmacare and community care systems being developed in this country.
These are things that under our administration were brought forward in 2003 and 2004. In 2000 we injected enormous amounts of money into the system to help bring it up to scratch and to start moving in this direction. This was never supported at the time by the member's party, but we cannot continue to look backward. She is trying to look forward and again I want to give her credit for that.
This is not rocket science. Groups have told us what to do. The Romanow report said many things needed to be done. There are lots of things we need to do to make a sustainable, effective, efficient system in this country.
The hon. member made an important point in her motion and that was the issue of increased adoption of technological developments.
I was at the Pacific Northwest economic region, or PNWER, conference in Calgary in August. One of the pieces talked about was the sharing of health care information to create more effective systems across the border.
Interestingly enough, even though the United States and Canada have very different health care systems, what we did hear at that conference was that all of the people who were there who were health care providers and professionals working in the systems, including the private insurance companies in the United States, were envious of what Canada had started in our Infoway systems and the money that had been put into making it work and the money that continued to be injected in it over the years.
Canadians at that meeting, not politicians but people who worked in the health care system, bemoaned the fact that it had been cut. What everyone was saying, including the American insurers and the American deliverers of their system, was that within that system lay the ability for people in very different parts of the country and different isolated areas to be given the kind of information they needed so that they could have a timely attention to intervention, so that they could in fact have the ability to get information about the patient quickly so that duplication of tests was not done.
The group was saying Infoway improves timeliness, it improves wait lists, and it improves information so that we do not have duplication. Therefore, it saves a lot of money and it is one of the best systems we have seen and would really like to use. We are sorry to hear that it now may not survive and is not as effective as it could be. Again I want to congratulate the hon. member for bringing it up, because it is something very important. She has hit on an important piece in making the system work better.
Section (b) in the motion speaks to the issue of a better recognition of the changing roles of health care professionals and the needs of Canadians. That is bang on once again. We know that three million Canadians do not have access to a primary care physician.
We know there are a lot of people here, as I said earlier, in this country who have medical degrees, who are family practitioners and would like to be able to work. I would like to speak to this clearly, because I was given that portfolio in our administration in 2004 and for a year I went around the country looking at the issue of foreign-trained workers, foreign credentials and people having the ability to work in this country.
We put forward a huge plan, but we did not succeed in winning government. We put money first into health care, about $95 million to move forward with physicians at least, and we were working with the nurses. History has it that we no longer were the government and this all disappeared. What we have now is a 1-800 number and all or some of the community structures that we put in place are completely gone.
Indeed it is important to have a better recognition of the changing roles of health care professionals, because we know there are many nurse practitioners and other health care providers who could provide appropriate service given their appropriate training. We could work as multi-disciplinary teams. That is a solution right now to some of the health care problems, but to do that, one has to continue to do the work that our administration did in looking at primary care clinics with multi-disciplinary teams as pilot projects set up in places such as British Columbia and Ontario, which were showing great results with nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists and everyone in one-stop shopping for the patient. It was effective, efficient, and it saved money. It was able to be timely, and that was very important for everyone. Again, all those things that we set in place seem to have disappeared, because I agree with the hon. member's section (b).
Section (c) calls for a greater focus on strategies for healthy living and injury prevention, and again, I want to thank my colleague for pinpointing one of the most important issues. Some 60% of diseases are preventable. I have heard nothing from the member's government about the issue of primary prevention, secondary prevention, dealing with issues such as obesity, and looking at HIV/AIDS. There is now a HARRTT, or highly active antiretroviral therapy, program developed and being used in British Columbia so that patients can have a pill as soon as they are diagnosed HIV positive that will bring down the viral load. The British Columbia government is doing it, but the federal government has not even deemed it an important enough issue. That is just one example.
I want to thank the hon. member for an excellent motion.